“There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.”
“The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.”
“Face the complexity involved in making ethical choices.”
“This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails--eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
“Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.”
“It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.”
“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”
“He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante s Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man s unvarnished verdict of himself?”
“Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.”
“We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.”
“It is very wrong to kill any one[.] Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!”
“The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.”
“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”
“Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.”
“I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and the bee; as do other sentient beings. I will always be in favor of veganism as a minimum because I believe that sentient beings have a right not to be used as someone else s property. They ask us to be brave for them, to be clear for them, and I see no other acceptable choice but to advocate veganism. If these statements make me a fundamentalist, then I will sew a scarlet F on my jacket so that all may know I m fundamentally in favor of nonviolence; may they bury me in it so that all will know where I stood.”
“Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we ve yet to win. You d think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven t actually produced the promised results.”
“Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.”